I recall a video-meeting in the early days of such things. I had to travel two and a half hours to get to the special 'video-conferencing room' of the consultant's office. We had a two-hour slot booked with them in their hi-tech room. There were six of us at this end connecting to the customer, another four located, physically, about thirty minutes drive from this centre. The connection was troublesome and we were tended by several experts in this matter. After one hour fifty-five minutes the connection was finally made and we exchanged greetings, whereupon we were ejected from the room as it was booked by another group.

A two-hour return journey.... I wondered whether to return to the office for the remaining hour-or-so. Not for long.

Whenever a Victorian entrepreneur had made it big, and bought a nice house in the country to show off, it had to have a library in. In order to furnish it, they would buy books by the yard. Simply tell them how much shelf-space you wanted filling, and crates of suitaby-impressive leather-bound tomes would arrive. Buy a few others with engraved plates to leave open on the library table, and you could safely invite your houseguests in.

Rearranging your bookshelves to hide the embarrassing stuff, and maybe adding a potted plant, so that your Zoom background looks better, is just the modern equivalent.

I have never tried it but zoom has virtual backgrounds in it's settings. There must be a market for a customiseable background app so that it doesn't like a generic library/kitchen/toilet.

Even better would be a background app that you could import video scenes into, one day you could zoom from a busy office, next from the top of a bus or from the sea bed, much more interesting.

Watching the first video in the article, I bet that is the only time ever a DPD van has apparently been in the right place at the right time.

The virtual backgrounds look fake because the keying edge is obvious. Everyone can tell immediately that you're showing a fake background - especially if more than one participant is using the same background image. This just makes me even more curious about what's really going on behind them and why they're trying to hide it: is it a Turkish bath? is it a bedroom? is there a whipping post? etc.

Or simply you don't want the gits that you work with to see your place full stop?

I don't want them at my place in the flesh - not going to let them view the place

My "set dressing" is some rather scruffy bookshelves stuffed with a combination of books and other miscellanea, and a large cut-out of Gnasher.

So far, only one person has commented on the Gnasher. I have to say I am somewhat disappointed.

Just the one? I say, I'd be jolly disappointed too. Rest assured it would have raised a comment from me.

To date aside from the usual cats n kids, the only items note worthy I've seen has been a Dalek (a good size one too) and a rather fetching display of whisky.

One supplier I've known for years, who typically uses the company backdrop, did call in once without it and I noticed he had a load of Grace Jones album covers framed on the wall. Queue spending about 45 minutes chatting about 80s music and me buying a couple of the frames. Rather natty, you can slide the covers in and out and change your display.

I love to put other low resolution video clips as my background so viewers get entertained by masterbating monkies, dogs licking themselves, fornicating animals, critters dropping a steamer, or other forms of "all natural & wholesome goodness" that makes them chortle. When someone invariably asks me WTF I have as my backdrop, I smile innocently & reply "It's the bit of my library I've cleaned up enough to be presentable." I'll point off to one side & claim there's a potted plant (where the monkey is currently wanking), or to the other side to claim it's a small end table covered in a red & white checkered doiley (where the lions are humping), or directly behind me to claim is my collection of every $RandomAuthor's books (where the trains entering the tunnel is playing in endless loops). When they say that is NOT what they are seeing I'll pretend to be confused & say that the stream must being hacked by script kiddies. At which point the boss will either tell everyone to ignore my background or tell me to disconnect. Either way is fine by me since I really didn't want to be there anyway.

Now if you'll excuse me I shall cue up some rather disturbing hentai porn for my next meeting...

I disabled the laptop camera and just say that a Windows update borked my camera. So sorry.

Anon because obviously.

I uninstalled the camera driver and blame the IT department...

My work laptop has to go into various customer sites and cleanrooms, and several of them have a no camera policy (although this seemingly gets ignored for smart phones).

So no Mr Customer, I can't turn on my camera for your multi-hour zoom/teams/webex shoutfest, as I don't have one due to your own site policies.

And the irony is, I'm working from home in my study, and directly behind me is actually a real wall full of loaded bookshelves...

My library-office room was once a bedroom. The wall behind me is entirely books. In front of me is mostly books. Front of desk has 3 x book cases.

Side walls about 1/3 bookcases.

I only WFH now because I packed in Electronics and IT and only write fiction that's officially fiction. Both sorts, SF and F. Either can have all other genres.

Some of the reports in the old days were fiction. We rarely did video or audio conferencing, so tended to travel.

I upgraded to a lovely 2560 x 1440 screen and closed the laptop lid. I went into Currys to look at webcams and ordered from China at 1/20th the price, because I use Viber and Zoom to chat with family members and if I open the laptop they see the side of my face.

Why do they all have microphones and assume you run Windows? I use a headset.

In my last job both in the office and 'WFH', we never did calls with the cameras on. The screen was only used if you were being shown something on someone else's desktop. Non one ever asked "can I see what you look like today?", and if I had never met someone in person I could just let my imagination run wild.

We used have an internal sweepstake on what our suppliers actually looked like. We felt we knew them well because we were always on the phone. We never got it right.

One contact had a very squeaky voice, easily recognised from the start. We envisaged him to be thin, slight and short, probably dressed casual. He turned out to be very large, tall and dressed in an immaculate tailored suit.

It's great when misconceptions get destroyed.

Long before webcams were a thing we used to call our supplies department to order stuff. We had to do that in the morning, since the friendly woman who ran it worked in security in the afternoons. She had a gorgeous, young, sexy voice, and we (age-20-something male engineers) all drooled at the thought of meeting her.

Then one day someone had to visit the HQ site, and was signed in by a security agent. It was only when she started speaking that they realised that the very large woman 'of a certain age' signing them in was their supplies contact.

Don't get me wrong, she was a lovely, helpful person, but not at all what we'd imagined.

We had one of those too, she used to handle telephone VAX/VMS support from our Bristol office in the late 90s. In retrospect the VAX knowledge should have clued us in that she was a bit older than we thought...

"In my last job both in the office and 'WFH', we never did calls with the cameras on."

Same for me, but actually it is because of my generous 800 kbps (bits, not bytes) DSL line. There's no way upstream vid would fly !

I have to say I was wondering why many colleagues had suddenly those super cool background in they calls !

Thanks for educating me, Dabsy. Merci !

My parents never bothered to hide the Dennis Wheatley books: I recall a primary school head teacher once enquiring if I was baptised or not.

Was it none of his businesses?

I saw this a little while ago, where the books on the bookcase looked like the old Penguin Book that had the sleeves different colours.

It suggested to me that they probably hadn't read any of them.

If there was one "good" thing about lockdown IME (very subjective I know!) it was that the hairdressers and barbers were shut too, which meant IME no one wanted to be seen. Things have of course changed now as we've started to open up again,

Again IME, the Zoom/Teams background thing degenerated in to a pissing up the wall contest of who had been on the most exotic holiday and had the pictures to prove it.

Again IME, the Zoom/Teams background thing degenerated in to a pissing up the wall contest of who had been on the most exotic holiday and had the pictures to prove it.

And the winner was the one with Olympus Mons in the background.

.... but I bet her Mons are spectacular!

----------> Other spectacular Mons are available!

In that case, meet [1]Olympus Mons .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympus_Mons

With so many Zoom meetings, I got one of the green-screen backdrops (cheap, as I'm too mean to spend much)! I often have a picture relevant to the meeting group as my background (often the organisation logo), or something totally off-beat (creates discussion to break the ice). However, before erecting the green screen, I took a photo of the bookshelves behind and sometimes use that. Yes, it's exactly what would be seen without the screen but saves the pfaff of taking it down.

.... lot at how they liked to be interviewed, the background they choose - it has to convey the idea they are well educated, clever people.

Here Berlusconi was known since the 1990s for his obsession to look good on camera, it has been said he has a fake studio setup to be used for interviews, with everything accurately laid out to make him look good - books, family photos (not the bunga-bunga ones, of course), and so on... he could probably write a book about it, and explain how to trump (eh eh) others in your Zoom/WebEx call....

he could probably write a book about it,

He probably could, if he could write.

He could still pay a ghost writer to write the book for him, as most politicians do...

He could, if he were smart enough for that. Only two problems with it though:

1) He isn't smart enough to think if it himself

2) He won't listen to others

I heard about this [1]bookshelf thing earlier this year .

Seems the company that sells books for TV sets has seen an uptick thanks to Zoomers looking to impress.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-55818287

Read this as "BBC covered bookshelf" and the broadcaster was not the first thing that sprang to mind. Sorry.

The most interesting thing I've seen in someone else's background was a naked woman. It was his rather plump middle-aged wife walking past the doorway - not a pretty sight at all.

However, this week I went for a midday run and then headed for the shower, only to find there was no hot water and so went to investigate. It was only later I contemplated I too had been wandering about in the buff while my wife was on a video call, and I had indeed walked past her open doorway at least twice. I believe her camera is usually pointed at the wall beside the doorway, but still, I probably could have been more careful and hope the angle hadn't been changed.

It sounds to me that an expanse of some sort of towel-like material might do the trick.

A flannel over the face to avoid identification?

(As suggested by a tour guide in Japan when someone pointed out the flannel/towel in an onsen was not really large enough to cover their modesty.)

> It was his rather plump middle-aged wife walking past the doorway - not a pretty sight at all.

I have a couple of friends on Facebook, who've occasionally put up a mortified post about (e.g.) how they were handing their partner a cuppa in the morning, only to realise that said partner was on a conference call, and they hadn't bothered tying their dressing gown closed...

I work from my study so have always had book shelves, with books, in my background. We decorated the room so the books have changed with more theology titles on show (they are used) but like not readable given webcam quality and distance.

I was lucky because I had renovated my study a few years before the pandemic, to make it more comfortable and made it also a little stylish - I did not put a bookshelf behind my desk, but a half-height cabinet, because I needed room for a large XIX century painting, and needed also a surface for a couple of bronze sculptures as well. On one side there's also an upright piano with some old prints of ancient astronomical instruments above it. All of those were left to me by my grandparents, I had to buy nothing.

That become my backdrop for calls, LOL! A few months ago a manager asked me if I could give him the image I was using as a background. He was stunned when I told him that was my real study, and moved the camera around to show him....

Brilliant!

On the subject of mistakenly assumed to be fake backgrounds: lots of our company execs liked to use "plant floor" stock images from the company archives for their backgrounds, so it would look like they were remoting in from an assembly line. On one instance of a weekly recurring call, the organizer appeared to have gotten bored with having his office wall in the background. On this call, the background was the side of one of the buses built at that facility. After welcoming everyone to the call, he noted that he'd be muted unless required to provide input, as he truly was on the production line, and it was rather noisy.

to organise a sweepstake on whether your curry leftovers might be removed more effectively by hydrochloric acid or a blow-torch.

Or bet on how long it will take for a new kind of life form to emerge from it and make the plates move by themselves.

Talking about bass lines, this is one of my favourite ones:

[1]Patrick Coutin - J'aime regarder les filles

[1] https://youtu.be/DUIRCiTN6Gk

Well now you've gone and reminded me of Holly's premature April Fools gag on Red Dwarf!

Several years ago I worked for six months at a big investment bank, where I was appalled to find they used Lotus Notes for email. I'm working for them again at present, and they're using Skype for all their conferencing.

I extensively used Skype in the past months when the company WebEx was hardly usable. Despite the attempts by MS to kill it it worked well enough.

Up here in Scotland, one of our public health officials is always immaculately turned out when she's interviewed - almost daily - from her home; makeup, hair, clothes and always with a very tasteful, very fresh flower arrangement in her nicely decorated room. But over her shoulder is a surface-mounted light switch fed by a cable conduit and I CAN'T FOCUS ON ANYTHING ELSE!

@Calum.

There's a word for that - OCD, but I prefer to call it a CDO, which is like an OCD, but just with the letters in the right order.

but just with the letters in the right order LIKE THEY DAMN WELL SHOULD BE .

FTFY ;)

There does seem to be a middle aged man guitars thing going on in the Zoom backgrounds I see. I'm not sure if they want to be Tony Blair or Brian Cox, but I do fear it could be the upcoming social media snigger-trigger...

Charity shops had shelves full of them. Go and make them an offer for them, or, better still, give them a donation for taking a photo of those shelves with these tomes and use that photo as a background

Most charity shops in my old high street used to have hand-written signs on their doors: "No more Da Vinci Codes please".

For the first few weeks of WFH, I wanted to go back into the office to photograph it from where my webcam had been located pre-lockdown; thus providing the perfect background image.

Common sense prevailed: that's hardly a reason to break lockdown.